The collected works of Lana Brindley: writer, speaker, blogger

OpenStack at linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au this year is being held on the beautiful University of Western Australia campus, in Perth.

About 500 geeks have descended on the campus, with talks being organised into six topic streams across three days. The conference is entirely volunteer-run, with financial and community support from Linux Australia. The conference is designed by and for developers, with an emphasis on deeply technical talks. Of course, it’s not all code, though. An important aspect of open source technology is the community, and usually one track at linux.conf.au is dedicated to community matters such as diversity, governance, and documentation.

Every year, the conference schedule belies a popular trend in open source tech. This year, that trend has definitely been OpenStack, with many talks discussing various aspects of the project including continuous integration, bare metal provisioning, and deployment. Some of the highlights (to watch video of these talks, see the links at the end of this post):

One of the most important and interesting aspects of OpenStack is its ability to link in with other projects to extend and expand its use. The conference has been a great opportunity for developers to work out how they can use OpenStack to help their own projects. Rackspace also helped encourage this by offering developers at the conference free access to the Rackspace cloud for OpenStack developers.

Of course, sometimes it’s not just the formal talks at a conference that are the best part. Sometimes it’s all about meeting a new person who might be able to help you out with that sticky problem, or catching up with old friends and having the opportunity to just geek out for a little while over a nice meal and maybe a drink or two.

Where the bloody hell are ya?!

Who wrote all this stuff?

All writing on this blog is the work of Lana Brindley and does not necessarily reflect the view of Rackspace, OpenStack, or any other group with which I am affiliated, except where I have used direct quotes (which are attributed to the original authors where possible). All images were either taken by me, shared under their individual licencing requirements, or obtained as stock photography.